


221B Baker Street: If These Walls Could Talk...

by stepfordgeek



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Baker Street, Meta, Wallpaper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:35:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1263124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepfordgeek/pseuds/stepfordgeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wallpaper in 221B Baker Street is iconic and beautiful. In addition to looking absolutely stunning, the wallpaper also comments on the show's relationship with the ACD canon. The walls are talking and they're talking meta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	221B Baker Street: If These Walls Could Talk...

([picture source](https://twitter.com/arwelwjones/status/299157505047678977/photo/1))

([picture source](https://twitter.com/arwelwjones/status/303795289918148608/photo/1))

The walls in 221B _are_ talking and they’re talking meta.

(picture source if not stated otherwise: <http://sc.aithine.org>)

If you had to describe the sitting room of 221B Baker Street to someone who has never seen it, what would you tell them?

_The sitting room is on the first floor of a terrace house in central London, there are two chairs next to the fireplace, one modern, one traditional, there are lots of books and papers floating around the room, there’s a sofa opposite the fireplace.  Behind that sofa there is black-and-white wallpaper that covers the entire back wall._

This is as far as I get in my description without having to mention the wallpaper. Think of 221B. How long does it take till you see black and white wallpaper floating before your eyes? I’d wager a guess: not long.

Both Paul Mc Guigan and Arwel Wyn Jones love working with wallpaper and they do it [quite](http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2006/02/23/paul_mcguigan_lucky_number_slevin_2006_interview.shtml) [often](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10010066-push/news/1793067/five_favorite_films_with_push_director_paul_mcguigan/).  Arwel’s [twitter bio](https://twitter.com/arwelwjones%20%20%20) consists of one sentence: “It’s all about the wallpaper!”  Most sets they have created for _Sherlock_ feature wallpaper.  

The show is a visual feast for wallpaper geeks.

Before we can dive into this feast, we need to be aware of **what wallpaper is and what wallpaper does.**

Wallpaper covers walls that would otherwise be bleak and dirty and not nice to look at. That is its most important function.

In the past wallpaper was used to stabilise and insulate badly built walls. I know of one building in Manchester in which 28 layers of wallpaper have been found, all plastered over one another. Wallpaper captures the moment because in its very essence it was not made for eternity.  In the past (I’m talking 17th, 18th and 19th century here), papers had to be changed every 3 to 4 years because dirt and grime and life took a toll on the material so that it needed to be replaced.

Because of this constant need for replacement people needed to choose new wallpaper every couple of years. The changes in taste can tell us about the values of a certain time and the choice of individual papers gives us insights into the values of the people who choose them.

Wallpaper is not permanent; it is a temporary feature of a room and expresses the personality and values of the people who live surrounded by these walls.    

Wallpaper expert Gill Saunders said that “its very ubiquity renders it invisible” and Julie Metha called wallpaper patterns “white noise for the eyes”.  Because wallpaper is such a banal, everyday object we usually do not think twice about it, yet it is in the background and influences us without us noticing.

As Gill Saunders pointedly asked: “After all who would think to look for “meaning” in wallpaper? “ 

**Sherlockians do.**

So, let’s see what stories the walls of 221B can tell us.

Between the unaired pilot and ASiP a lot of changes have been made. One of the biggest changes was the redesign of the sitting room in 221B.  Why does 221B look the way it looked in the pilot and why does it look like it looks now?

Canon does not specify anything about the colour of the walls. The only information I found was that there is a mirror above the fireplace.

That leaves the entire surface of the wall open for set designers to play.  

The Sherlock Holmes Museum in Baker Street in London chose red wallpaper while the Sherlock Holmes Museum at the foot of the Reichenbach falls in Meiringen, Switzerland chose a rather busy Arts & Crafts pattern. It looks like Morris & Co. to me but I’m not an expert on Arts & Crafts paper, so I can’t be sure.

**Sherlock Holmes Museum, Baker Street, London:**

([picture source](http://icadservice.tumblr.com/post/30987465345/the-mystery-of-221b-baker-street))

**Sherlock Holmes Museum, Meiringen, Switzerland:**

([picture source](http://www.flickriver.com/photos/buzztrips/11944623145/))

Both choices are reasonable for a sitting room at the end of the 19th century. It is not hyper chic but generally appropriate for its time. The trendiest version of a sitting room in the 1890ies would’ve looked more like [this](http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/period-rooms-and-gardens/virtualtour/period-rooms/room-7---a-drawing-room-in-1890/)

The 221B of the unaired pilot of _Sherlock_ quotes the Baker Street Museum version of the sitting room.

The wallpaper is red. Plain red, no frills just red. The spaces left and right of the fireplace are tan and visually repeat the colour of the arch that frames the fireplace area as a whole.  It is just a wall. We could discuss the choice of this dark, burgundy red, but this room is visually quoting the Holmes Museum sitting room therefore this is rather a moot point.  What the colour tells us from a 19th century point of view is that it is not a room designed for women. Dark, strong colours were often chosen for rooms men spent their time in but at the end of the 19th century this was the case for most rooms apart from bedrooms and nurseries, so there is not much we can work with.

The wall behind the sofa is not uniformly red. There is a light red on dark red floral pattern but it is rather hard to see the exact nature of the pattern. It looks like a standard floral pattern to me.

All in all **this is just a room, nothing that warrants a second look or even a second thought.**

**And boy does that change by the time we see the sitting room in ASiP!**

Before we dive into the world of “our” 221B, let’s look again at what wallpaper reveals about the people who made it a background to their lives. Wallpaper historian Gill Saunders has expressed this quite nicely:

_“Though it is often overlooked, wallpaper occupies a position of intimacy in our lives and it can express significant aspects of the character of the home and of its inhabitants. The choice of a wallpaper can reveal - or at least imply - much about class and economic status, as well as alluding more discreetly to sexual, political and moral orientations.”_

_“It has long been believed that homes express the personalities of those who live in them - or are designed to project a particular image of the inhabitants. The home itself constitutes a personal narrative of aspiration, taste, social status and identity as well as serving to frame familial and other proximate relationships.”_

Yes, walls are revealing hidden truths about the people who decide to paper their walls with a certain design but here’s the thing: **neither John nor Sherlock chose the paper(s) in 221B**. At least John does not. The walls are the way they are when he moves in. Sherlock has moved in some time before that but he probably did not paper the walls when he moved in, his preferred way of redecorating comes with a higher lead content and yellow spray paint.

Speaking of lead, Sherlock would be delighted to hear that 19th century wallpaper was quite often poisonous because the most popular green hues contained arsenic and the best whites contained lead. Add damp to the mix, wait for arsenic gas to form and get slow murder by wallpaper. Not the most efficient way to kill someone but it gives you enough time to construct an alibi.

Anyway, back to 221B. So, the walls were like this when the boys moved in, so why talk about them any longer? The wallpaper clearly won’t tell us anything about Sherlock and John - apart from the fact that they don’t seem to mind it, or they consider it too much work to change it?

True, the wallpaper itself will not tell us anything about Sherlock and John, but the walls are talking nevertheless.

They are telling us a story about _Sherlock_ ; **the walls are talking meta**.

In the new version of 221B the wallpaper has been changed completely. The wall around the fireplace is no longer uniformly red but has received a complete makeover.

This is vintage wallpaper ([as confirmed by Arwel on twitter](https://twitter.com/arwelwjones/status/439863049999360000)). The pattern itself can be described as damask wallpaper with a diaper pattern.  Diaper patterns were very fashionable during Victorian times and this wallpaper fits the ideal to a t, as Victorian design expert Charles Locke Eastlake explained in 1878:

_“As ‘diaper’  designs have been more than once referred to in these pages, it may be as well to explain that they belong to that class of patterns which are either definitely enclosed by bounding lines, or at least **divided into compartments of a uniform size throughout.** These compartments or ‘diapers’ are often of a geometrical form, and in that case may either be round or square, **diamond-shaped** or quatrefoiled in outline. The best are those in which **segmental curves are blended with angular forms**. For ordinary sized rooms they **should not exceed five or six inches** across in any direction, but for bedrooms,  &c., much less will suffice.”_

The pattern is therefore a bit on the large side but otherwise a perfectly reasonable choice for a Victorian sitting room. The colour, a reddish brown with a golden, leafy damask pattern is again visually quoting the Holmes Museum, it is still red after all. The design is common for the late 19th century.  There are dozens of similar patterns out there. The Smithsonian has embossed wallpaper in almost the same colours dating back to 1870/80:

([picture source](https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18798377/))

The large pattern is ‘acceptable’ from a Victorian point of view because this wall is not used to hang pictures. Walls that were used to hang pictures were generally supposed to have a small, unobtrusive pattern themselves in order not to crowd out the paintings but for walls that were not covered with any artwork, a dominant pattern was acceptable.

It would be a shame to cover this paper anyway, I mean look at those details:

([picture source](http://www.radiotimes.com/photos/2012-01-24/photo-gallery-sherlock-props))

The gold effect puts this paper in a rather expensive category. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the effects were hand-painted. In most scenes the paper does not get to shine but in some behind- the-scenes-shots you can see it sparkle.

(screenshot mine)

**So what we see on the wall around the fireplace is an example of Victorian craftsmanship that in some light looks a bit lacklustre but under the right light still shines and sparkles. Keep that in mind, we will need this later.**

But let’s turn around and look at the other wall. 

Yes, it’s time to look at one of the most iconic wallpaper of all times: Zoffany Nureyev Navarre Flock Wallpaper in Dark Chocolate. (one might argue that historically there are other papers that are more important  than this one – Zuber’s Les Vues de Suisse comes to mind -  but the level of instant recognition and how widely it has spread makes this the rockstar of wallpapers). 

([picture source](http://www.zoffany.com/pages/products/products_wallpapers-detail/nureyev1/1/#))

Here we’re dealing with wallpaper that features a diapered Fleur de Lys pattern.  The pattern itself is very similar to the one on the opposite wall. Again it is not just a simple paper, but an elaborate, expensive one.  While the vintage paper featured gold effects this wall uses a flock print on a pearly background. Flock print used to be very expensive because the wool had to be cut into tiny particles, wool dust essentially. Then the pattern was covered in glue or paint and the wool was dusted over the wet surface, therefore sticking to the paper. It was a labour intensive way of producing wallpaper; therefore it was a luxury item.

We have two walls, both feature similar patterns and both use luxurious effects, even though they’re not quite as visible on the second wall.

The second wall takes a 19th century design and updates it to make it fit into the 21st century. The designs have a common root but in Victorian times this wallpaper would not have been used in this room. For one the pattern itself is too big, as we’ve seen, 5 to 6 inches is considered the upper limit, the diapers of the Navarre pattern are quite a bit larger than that. On top of this the contrast between the brown Fleur de Lys and the pearly background is too harsh for 19th century style expert Charles Eastlake:  “two shades of the same colour are generally sufficient for one paper” – he’s talking again about using the wall as a background for artwork but in all my considerable research on Victorian wallpapers I have not found any contrast as extreme as the brown/pearl contrast in this paper.  

Which means that while it may look like a classic Victorian wallpaper design, it is in fact not Victorian at all but a 21st century re-imagination of classical motives.

This wall dominates the entire room. It is iconic and we love it. **It uses 19 th century elements and transports them to the 21st century and manages to be classic and cool and extremely popular.**

Does that in any way sound familiar?

Yes. The walls are talking. They’re talking meta. Not about Sherlock and John or Mrs Hudson or her former tenants who may or may not have chosen to paper their walls in such an eclectic manner. No. The walls are talking meta about the show itself. It is a parallel to the way Moffat and Gatiss have taken something from the 19th century (ACD’s Holmes canon) , have taken its dominant features and have turned them into an immediately recognizable icon of the 21st century (their version of Sherlock Holmes).

The red and gold vintage paper is like ACD Holmes while the brown and pearl Zoffany paper is like BBC Sherlock. Both great in their own way but neither would quite fit in the other’s world. The golden wallpaper is beautiful but a bit dated while the Zoffany paper would not fit into a true Victorian setting.

Yet the show connects them. We get both modern Sherlock being brilliant in front of the modern setting:

But we also constantly see ACD Holmes in 221B, there’s an entire wall full of his Victoriana after all! But while we’re looking at the Victorian wall we’re constantly being confronted with our modern view on Sherlock, the mirror is the key:

within _Sherlock_ our focus stays modern, even when we look at the ACD canon.

The 21st century outshines the 19th century but in its very essence the 21st century version is constructed with the same elements as the 19th century version and could not exist without it.

 


End file.
